Ron \Pigpen\" McKernan" Grateful Dead
What was special about the grateful dead?
What was special about the grateful dead?
Along with Garcia and second guitarist Bob Weir, McKernan was a participant in the predecessor groups leading to the formation of the Grateful Dead, beginning with the Zodiacs and Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. Drummer Bill Kreutzmann was added and the band evolved into the Warlocks. Around 1965, McKernan urged the rest of the Warlocks to switch to electric instruments. Bassist Phil Lesh joined soon after, and they became the Grateful Dead. The group were keen to involve McKernan in the band, as he was the group's original leader and was considered the best singer and frontman.  The Dead's early sets centered around blues and R&B covers chosen by McKernan. By the end of 1966, Garcia had improved his musical skills and wanted to assert himself more as a leader and musical director, changing the band's direction and reducing McKernan's contributions. In 1967, drummer Mickey Hart joined the Grateful Dead, followed by classically trained keyboardist Tom Constanten in 1968, further changing the group's style. Constanten often replaced McKernan on keyboards in the studio, as McKernan found it difficult to adapt to the new material that Garcia and Lesh composed for the band.  In October 1968, McKernan and Weir were nearly fired from the band after Garcia and Lesh believed their playing was holding the band back from lengthy and experimental jamming. Garcia delegated the task of firing them to Rock Scully, who said that McKernan "took it hard." Weir promised to improve, but McKernan was more stubborn. According to Garcia biographer Blair Jackson, McKernan missed three Dead shows before vowing not to "be lazy" any more and rejoining, while Kreutzmann objected to replacing McKernan and said the event never happened. Following his discharge from the United States Air Force in November 1968, Constanten officially joined the band, having only worked in the studio while on leave up to that point. Road manager Jon McIntire commented that "Pigpen was relegated to the congas at that point and it was really humiliating and he was really hurt, but he couldn't show it, couldn't talk about it." He began to take Hammond organ lessons and learned how to use the various drawbars and controls.  After Constanten's departure in January 1970 over musical and lifestyle differences, McKernan nominally resumed keyboard duties. He contributed instrumentation to only two tracks (Hammond organ on "Black Peter" and harmonica on "Easy Wind", the latter as lead vocalist) on Workingman's Dead (1970), the band's breakthrough studio release. On the follow-up album American Beauty, keyboard parts were handled by Garcia and Lesh, along with session musicians Howard Wales and Ned Lagin. The 1971 live album Grateful Dead featured three overdubbed organ parts from Merl Saunders in addition to McKernan's contributions on "Big Railroad Blues", "The Other One", and "Me & Bobby McGee". While Garcia expressed frustration at McKernan's missed rehearsals and his inability to keep up with new material, Lesh was more forgiving, opining that "it was okay for Pigpen to lay out... we kept wanting Pigpen to be there because he was 'one of us.'" CANNOTANSWER
The Dead's early sets centered around blues and R&B covers chosen by McKernan. By the end of 1966,
Ronald Leon Rakow or Ron Rakow was the head of Grateful Dead Records and Round Records, and was manager of The Grateful Dead.

Early life 
Ron was born in Brooklyn, New York. He studied Economics at New York University where he earned his Bachelor of Science degree. He started his career as a runner on the New York Stock exchange floor and eventually was an arbitrageur and did corporate mergers and acquisitions for various corporations in New York City.

Grateful Dead 
Around 1965 Ron moved to San Francisco and started a small loans business called Guaranteed Factors. Not long after, he loaned money to the Grateful Dead to buy equipment and quickly joined as a photographer and later the band manager. During that time, he lived across from the street from the band at 715 Ashbury street.

In March 1972, Ron came up with the idea for Grateful Dead Records and Round Records and worked with Jerry Garcia to develop the business plan known as the 'So What Papers'. In July 1972, he was invited to Bill Kreutzmann's house to present the initial idea to the band. In April 1973, the plan was finally approved and Grateful Dead Records and Round Records was born. The labels went on to produce four of the bands records between 1973-1976.

Filmography 
Ron was also the executive producer and appears in the 1977 documentary film, The Grateful Dead Movie.

Legal Troubles 
On April 11, 2007, Rakow was sentenced to five years in federal prison for tax evasion of $2.2 million since 1985 from income unrelated to his relationship with The Grateful Dead.'  On December 1, 2011, Rakow was released from prison.

References

Grateful Dead Books

Grateful Dead

de:Grateful Dead Records "Born Cross-Eyed" is an original composition by the San Francisco psychedelic rock group the Grateful Dead. It was written by rhythm guitarist Bob Weir during the band's sessions creating the album Anthem of the Sun, produced by David Hassinger, in 1968. It was released as a B-side with the single "Dark Star", one of the band's best-known musical excursions.

The single was first released in April 1968 by Warner Bros. Records and is a different mix than the version included on the Anthem of the Sun album. The single was re-released in the UK in 1977 as a promotion distributed with the Dark Star magazine. The single release included lyrics of Dark Star on the back cover.

This single version of the song would be later released as part of the compilation album What a Long Strange Trip It's Been by Warner Bros. in 1977, the twelve-CD retrospective box set The Golden Road (1965-1973) in 2001, released by Rhino Records (a subsidiary of Warner Bros.), and the 2003 re-release of Anthem of the Sun by Rhino.

Albums

The following are the albums on which the song has appeared:
Studio albums
Anthem of the Sun, Grateful Dead, 1968
Live albums
Dick's Picks Volume 22, Grateful Dead, 2001
Road Trips Volume 2, Number 2, Grateful Dead, 2009

Compilation/Box sets
Some Of Our Best Friends Are, Various Artists, 1969
The Grateful Dead/Anthem Of The Sun, Grateful Dead, 1976
What a Long Strange Trip It's Been, Grateful Dead, 1977
The Golden Road (1965-1973), Grateful Dead, 2001

References

Grateful Dead songs
1968 songs
1968 singles
1977 singles
Songs written by Bob Weir Dick Latvala (26 July 1943 – 6 August 1999) was an American tape archivist for the Grateful Dead. He started the CD series Dick's Picks, a series that selects live music from Grateful Dead concerts. The first volume of Dick's Picks was released in 1993. The series continued after Latvala's death in 1999 until 2005, with later volumes being selected by David Lemieux. In 2012, the series inspired a spin-off officially known as Dave's Picks.

Personal life
As a senior studying psychology at San Francisco State University, Dick Latvala wrote a brief autobiography in 1965, apparently in preparation for his first time ingesting LSD. The autobiography details Latvala's basic philosophy and understanding of himself, his growing up, and his relationship with his parents and two sisters. Latvala described how he felt more comfortable having black friends rather than white friends, and became interested in the racial struggles of the United States. According to Steve Silberman, upon Latvala hearing the Grateful Dead in 1965 "it was the first music from white people he heard that approached the power of gospel." Latvala was known for his strong opinions, passionate conversations, and love of the Grateful Dead. 
 
Jesse Jarnow's Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America details much of Dick's personal and professional life as an adult. Dick grew up in the San Francisco-Bay Area, where he lived until moving to Hilo, Hawaii in 1974. Prior to Hawaii, Dick, his wife Carol, and their son Richie lived at one of Victor Baranco's Morehouse communes. Carol Latvala described Morehouse's philosophy and practices as "a combination of Sexual Freedom League material, [and] things they'd learned from witches, Scientology, and Buddhism."

In Hilo, Dick Latvala worked as a zookeeper. Hawaii is where Latvala began to collect recordings of Grateful Dead concerts, often mailing other tapers marijuana in exchange for tapes. Latvala would exchange long letters with tapers on the mainland and extend an invitation to visit Hawaii, to smoke pot and listen to the Grateful Dead at high volumes. Dick and Carol moved back to California in the early 1980s, and although divorced they remained friends and even next-door neighbors, both working for the Grateful Dead at their Front Street office in San Rafael. While Carol worked in the Dead's ticket office, Dick initially performed menial tasks as well as managing the band's music archives.

Throughout his life, Dick Latvala was an avid consumer of psychoactive substances, "a constant acid consumer, a bong hit taker, a coffee drinker, a cigarette smoker, a drinker." At one point, the Grateful Dead paid for Latvala to enter rehab for alcohol. The autobiography he wrote in 1965 begins "I consider any form of psychotherapy . I prefer LSD for a number of reasons."

As Latvala recalled in 1993 to David Gans about his first LSD experience: "A major turning point occurred on June 28, 1965. I took LSD in a research project in 1965 in Menlo Park, in which I actually paid $500 to go through this experience, which was, perhaps, the most powerful single experience I ever went through... something happened that changed me forever."

Beyond his love of the Grateful Dead, Latvala enjoyed gospel music, Henry Kaiser, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Lead Belly, and Robert Johnson.

Work with the Grateful Dead
While living in Hawaii, Latvala became very active in tape trading. In addition to amassing a large collection of live recordings, in the 1970s Latvala began maintaining personal notebooks filled with commentary about particular Grateful Dead shows. As described by Grateful Dead archivist Nicholas Meriwether, Latvala "catalog[ed] his tapes in a series of notebooks, detailing their origin and provenance—who taped it and with what equipment—as well as when, where, what they played. He usually noted especially strong renditions as well as his impressions, which he would often revisit later, critiquing his critiques."

In the early 1980s Latvala began working at the Grateful Dead's Front Street office in San Rafael, where he did various odd jobs. Prior to Latvala's arrival, the band did not actively maintain an archive of their recorded concerts. It was Latvala who convinced the band about the importance of maintaining such an archive. Latvala eventually became the curator of Dick's Picks, a series of commercially released recordings of live Grateful Dead performances. Until Dick's Picks, the Grateful Dead typically released live albums that were specially recorded on multitrack source tapes, then professionally mixed.  Dick's Picks however, tapped into the band's vast 2-track audio collection, spanning thousands of hours of concerts.

During the early years of Dick's Picks until Latvala's death, 1993–1999, Latvala routinely posted on chat rooms at the band's web site, www.dead.net, and conversed with fans regarding his opinions of Grateful Dead recordings and what should be released next.  Latvala was known for his outspoken and sometimes wild opinions about particular Grateful Dead recordings.

Latvala received a mixed response from the larger Grateful Dead organization. As journalist Steve Silberman recalls, Latvala "was used to people ignoring him or thinking of him as low status in the scene... but I actually thought of him as one of the secret buddhas that protected the music... He was completely aware in Zen fashion that his work was the ultimate gift and the ultimate curse. He had to suffer because the collective ethos of the backstage scene was very bruising and masculine. He was in part a stand-in for all Deadheads, for whom [the band's roadies] had contempt."

Latvala was known for lending friends tapes from the official Grateful Dead vault. Nicholas Meriwether noted how many of tapes in the Grateful Dead Archive are labeled "'Courtesy of Dick Latvala. Do not circulate!'" In Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America, Jesse Jarnow highlights the ambiguous stance Latvala took about these tapes being re-circulated. While refusing to speak to one friend for two years after learning that he re-circulated tapes, Latvala also "loves the Grateful Dead too much and wants the word of their music to travel into every ear and mind possible." Jarnow even claims that Latvala gave taper and future Dark Star Orchestra guitarist Rob Eaton a "near-complete copy of the vault."

Death and legacy
Dick Latvala died following a heart attack at age 56, on August 6, 1999. David Gans dedicated the August 11, 1999 Grateful Dead Hour to the memory of Dick Latvala.

After his sudden death, the Grateful Dead continued the Dick's Picks series.  In memory of Dick's known wishes, the Grateful Dead released Dick's Picks Vols. 15 and 16, 9-3-77 and 11-8-69, respectively, which were two of Dick's favorite and most-discussed candidates for future release in his series. In many Dick's Picks albums, the name "LATVALA" can be seen somewhere in the album artwork, often carefully hidden.  This was apparently done to commemorate Latvala after his death. The Dick's Picks series gradually came under the creative direction of David Lemieux. Lemieux now releases live concerts under a spin-off series, Dave's Picks.

Dick Latvala's collection of Grateful Dead material was donated by Dick's wife, Carol, to the Grateful Dead Archive. As described by archivist Nicholas Meriwether "Latvala’s collection is divided into two major sections... his personal collection of tapes, more than 500 seven-inch and ten-inch reels, and his papers, which comprise more than a dozen linear feet of notebooks, correspondence, and other materials."

Noting Latvala's shift from dedicated fan to actual archivist, Nicholas Meriwether highlighted the three major themes reflected by Dick Latvala's story and his collection: the "porous the boundary between band and fan in the Grateful Dead phenomenon... how participation in the Dead phenomenon instilled a sense of historicity in fans... Most of all, the collection Latvala built demonstrates that it is impossible to tell the story of the Dead without discussing their fans. Deadheads are not only an inextricable part of the phenomenon, they are a vital part of the Archive. That connection goes to the heart of what Latvala’s collection also says about the phenomenon, for Latvala made the transition from amateur to professional, from fan to insider, eventually earning a living from his passion for the band."

In an obituary published by the Chicago Tribune, Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart said his strongest memory of Latvala was the image of him blaring Grateful Dead music at high volumes: "The neighbors would complain, the cops might call, he wouldn't care... In those moments, he was communing with God."

References

Grateful Dead
1943 births
1999 deaths
American people of Finnish descent
20th-century American musicians